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Indexed Collections (for RAG applications)

An indexed collection lets your chatbot search through your documents to find relevant information before responding. Instead of relying on the AI's built-in knowledge, the chatbot retrieves answers from files you upload — such as PDFs, reports, or wiki pages.

When should I use this?

When you want your chatbot's responses to be grounded in your uploaded documents.

Common examples include:

  • A customer support chatbot that answers questions from your product documentation or FAQs
  • An HR assistant that looks up company policies from an internal wiki or handbook
  • A research tool that searches across uploaded reports, studies, or reference materials
  • An onboarding guide that walks new participants through your own uploaded training content

How it works

To search documents by meaning, OCS uses an embedding model. Retrieving relevant passages and giving them to the AI model to answer from is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). See Local Index Optimization for a full explanation.

Using it in a chatbot

Once your collection is created and populated with files, link it to an LLM node. Linking the collection isn't enough on its own — add the {collection_index_summaries} prompt variable to that node's prompt so the chatbot knows to search it.

Snapshots

A snapshot is a read-only copy of an indexed collection at a point in time. It includes the collection's files, their indexed content, and its document sources. Use one to keep a reference copy before a large change, such as a big re-sync.

You create a snapshot from the Snapshots section at the bottom of the collection page. Each snapshot is listed there with a version number and date, such as v1, and you can open it to see what it contains. Creating one can take a while for large collections, and the page shows its progress.

Keep these limits in mind:

  • You can't add or remove files in a snapshot.
  • You can't restore, rename, or delete a snapshot.
  • Auto Sync skips snapshots, so they stay as they were.
  • Publishing a chatbot doesn't create a snapshot. See Collections and published chatbots for how published chatbots use collections.

See also

  • Local or Remote Indexes — choose where your files are indexed and how.
  • Document Sources — sync files automatically from Confluence or GitHub.